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Study Shows South Africa’s Entrepreneurial Spirit Dwindling After the 2010 World Cup

Business Report recently published an article by Donwald Pressly on research conducted by Mike Herrington, the executive director of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) and his team from the UCT Graduate School of Business, that shows that the entrepreneurial spirit honed by South Africans during the Soccer World Cup in 2010 has dwindled.

According to Herrington this is causing a wide array of problems including “poor education system, difficult labour laws, crime, government corruption and nepotism and generally unfavourable conditions for people starting a business”. Eddie Cottle’s South Africa’s World Cup: A Legacy for Whom? gives a critically informed and holistic analysis of the impact and legacy of such a mega-sporting event.

The entrepreneurial spirit fostered by the 2010 soccer World Cup has faded and is now at a new low, which the UCT Graduate School of Business attributes to the loss of an innovative spirit and to a “complicated cocktail of problems”.

Mike Herrington, the executive director of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), said this cocktail included the poor education system, difficult labour laws, crime, government corruption and nepotism and generally unfavourable conditions for people starting a business.